Americans actually do shoot quite well, but the rules around gun handling are incredibly strict for Olympic shooting.
Things like minor celebrations, emotion, or even the cadence of your walk while leaving the range can cause disqualification.
Since American shooters can’t hit a bullseye without shotgunning a beer and magdumping into the sky as eagles carry exploding fireworks in celebration, they often do not place in Olympic shooting
Or in other words, what’s missing from our country’s gun use is respect.
The vast majority of our issues with gun violence is the fact that we disrespect guns almost as much as each other, they’re just another crass tool for achieving a feeling, like power, masculinity, reassurance and comfort. So then guess what happens when you flood the streets with more guns than every other developed nation combined?
We are a nation of undisciplined shooters, they may shoot “quite well” in some cases, but for every shooter who does quite well at hitting a target you have several thousand who have no idea how to shoot, AND have no clue about gun safety, respect and responsible ownership.
Well, sure, but you don’t send a random selection of citizens to the Olympics. You send the best.
The nation with the most gun owners per capita and a huge population should have many pinnacle-tier shooters, even if it also has many bad ones. So the question is, why aren’t they at the Olympics?
Honestly? Opportunity. It starts with money, or willingness for you or your parents to give up everything that isn’t training.
I was in the service with some incredible shots. I’ve been on the range with some pretty incredible shots. Most of them would never have the opportunity for any number of reasons.
Some of that comes down to simply money. Flavor Flav is sponsoring our women’s water polo team because some of them were working three jobs while training to stay afloat. Not everyone wants to or even can do that.
A lot of the people who would be excellent at shooting have no interest in specifically Olympic shooting or training for the type of shooting required, unfortunately. That, and the military has probably poached the best of the best, and don’t want to show what “best of the best” shooting looks like for strategic reasons.
(side note, happy cake day!)
Respect is a big part of it. Another problem is that they aren’t seen as actual tools. They’re probably more often a male enhancement device than a tool.
They should be viewed as a tool for the production of meat, for the efficient removal of varmints. In the worst case they are a tool for the defense of self or others. That worst case scenario is actually very rare.
Tools and toys can be interchangeable. However: some pretty strict laws govern the use of toys like sports cars.
My shooting tools are mostly polymer stocked or gripped. Plain, cheapest base model I can get. Then I take them apart and work on the mechanisms to make them mine. I don’t have a lot of them, just have a few for my particular use cases.
I really like them. I get pleasure from using my tools. I also really like my lathe and my daily driver small truck. I’ve also taken them apart and worked on them.
I think this attitude should be required if one is going to own and be responsible for such a dangerous tool. There should be an interview process or something to weed out dumb fucks and the mentally unstable. After all, the militia was supposed to be well regulated. It’s not particularly complicated.
They’re probably more often a male enhancement device than a tool.
Exactly what I’m saying, and people hate hearing it, because guns are fun and if you tell people to have less fun with something they fucking want to rip your head off, especially as we enter an age of desocialization.
Desocialization is gonna be our really big problem, because while unstable backwoods hicks and suburban commando-wannabes are thoroughly worrying when they go out in the open, but they’re mostly harmless, they have social groups, they talk to others, they have range clubs, even “militia” groups that I’ve known are just chubby dads who want an excuse to camp in the desert and bring a cooler of beer.
Nah, where we really need to be concerned is the growing mass of people who cling to guns like pacifiers AND live in social isolation bubbles, spending all their time on social media and chat groups that only reinforce their beliefs, getting locked into weirder and weirder interpretations of reality, losing the line between reality and fantasy.
You saw this starting in earnest as far back as the Charlottesville “Unite The Right” white nationalist rally where one protester was murdered. There were, along the “hardened” white supremacists were no small number of kids. White, pasty, tubby kids who spend all their time on 4chan or in deeply unhinged areas of the internet. There are some famous clips of these kids, some crying on the curb after being pepper-sprayed, saying “This was supposed to be like a game!” as they sobbed.
If you notice, we’ve only had a dramatic uptick in mass-shootings since, and I firmly believe social isolation is breaking people. Most of the shooters we see now fit that bill, everyone is looking for patterns, but the only one I see is these are people with no friends, no social lives, infatuations with guns, and read fucked up nonsense on the internet until they believe it.
